Great work from our friends at XPLANE.com for the Harvard Business School! Thanks to both XPLAE and Harvard for making this video available to the public.

The inspiring and thought-provoking piece on global leadership was created in collaboration with Nitin Nohria, Richard P. Chapman Professor of Business Administration, and Co-Chair of the Leadership Initiative at Harvard Business School.

The video debuted earlier this month at Harvard Business School's "How Can Leadership Be Taught" symposium on June 9 and 10. We were honored to partner with Nitin to create a visually appealing, provocative piece that would inspire viewers to take action, get involved and be motivated to lead.

"Imagine Leadership" is six minutes long and available for viewing on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuuTlQ0FzEU. Inspired by the popular "Did You Know? 2.0" video that we created, the new piece has similar qualities in how it visually represents key factoids, people and critical information. However, unlike "Did You Know," this piece combines illustration with graphics and photography, allowing the most appropriate visual content to represent each subject.

I'm not sure I understand what Wolfram|Alpha is yet, but so far it's pretty impressive. Developed by Stephen Wolfram and his team, it claims to be a "computational knowledge engine". The input box looks like a search engine, but it is definitely NOT a search engine.

When you type in a question, it attempts to show you all of the relevant data it can find. It is actually calculating and charting this information real-time in order to present it to you. Because its built on top of the Mathematica Engine, it can also handle math problems.

I think this will be an important tool for many designers of infographics, because you can get some of your raw data directly from Wolfram|Alpha. As they add more data into the system over time, this will become one of your best resources for information. They have a pretty extensive page of examples by category that is a great place to start. Also watch the short video by Stephen Wolfram showing what the system can do.

Good infographic from the New Scientist showing how many years we have left of our key natural resources. Essentially these are basic bar and pie charts, but dressed up to make the overall graphic more compelling. The message is still clear though, and the author gets his point across very strongly.

This comes from a 2007 article in the New Scientist called "Earth's Natural Wealth: an Audit" that include two more infographics as well. The first is a map of where in the world are these natural resources are.

The next is a bubble graphic showing the scale of how much of each resource an average American will consume during their lifetime.

The Source listed on the first infographic: Armin Reller, University of Augsburg, Tom Graedel, Yale University

Why is another world popoulation map website Cool? Because on GunnMap, by Gunn Interactive, you can load your own data. There are a few example data sets preloaded like population, GDP growth, military spending and birth rate, but the best part is that you can paste in your own data to create a custom world map.

Here's a quick demo video from Arthur Gunn on how to use the site by pasting in data from the CIA website to create a new map:

Here's a fun one for Friday. Humans! by Reza Rasoli. Reminds me of The Matrix when Mr. Smith calls the humans a virus on the world.

Humans! is a 60 second global awareness PSA sensationalizing the excessive, all-consuming nature of the human being. This cute and naive Earth stands no chance against such an insatiable parasite. Witness its utter demise in a fun and sickening kind of way.